Switching WM and removing DE

[nemo]

Hi all,
I'm very, very new to Linux, but so far I've manager to install Sabayon and mess around in it a bit. Now I'm looking to change my window manager and (eventually) remove my desktop environment (xfce).
I installed spectrwm through Rigo, but I'm not sure where to go from there. Do I have to edit my ~/.xsession? And how can I remove/disable xfce?
Thanks in advance!

[cl00t]

Hi, if you're new to linux I would recommend playing around in gnome / kde / xfce / lxde to see which you prefer. I was a kde user but these days I prefer xfce & I have zero experience of spectrwm but it seem an interesting choice for someone brand new to linux. Anyway, I would download a few ISO's & play around.
You've picked the right distro anyway.

[Jomiel]

Hi,
to change the DE, you need to select the desired one when you login (there is a dropdown menu somewhere).

cheers
Jomiel

[batvink]

Hi Nemo, and welcome to SabayonLinux.

To first help you out with the scripts, you can take a look at spectrwm's own wiki page:
https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/spectrwm
to get some more info about the WindowManager.
If you scroll down near the end, there's a "spectrwm resources" section,
which contains links to their forum, Manpage, and Bug Tracker.
The Man page handles the config files.

Before removing DE's, what exactly do you have in mind?
XFCE isn't really that big, and can be an excellent fall-back, if the current DE somehow got screwed.

[batvink]

as root,

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equo remove libxfce4util xfconf --ask

Almost all xfce4 packages depend upon libxfce4util and xfconf,
so just purge those two and you remove everything related to xfce.
Except for "gtk-engines-xfce" and "xfce4-taskmanager", but you can remove those as well.

NOTE. do not use the "--deep" flag here.
I'm not sure, but when I did that , it leaved me with a unusable system.
With the "--deep" flag enabled, it removes also some system files, which deptest and libtest don't recover.

check the package list before proceeding., if in doubt, abort,
and show output here on the forum.
when done,

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equo conf update

to check if configuration files needs to be updated, manually.
then,

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equo deptest && equo libtest

It's pretty much the same as the guidelines for removing KDE
https://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=Remove_KDE
except for a few things.
success......

[gentoovortex]

@ batvink, thanks for posting the tip:

Code: Select all

equo remove libxfce4util xfconf --ask

which saves a lot of time removing 23 Xfce packages so one doesn't have to

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equo remove package1 package2 .... package23

to remove Xfce. I usually use the CoreCDX to do an installation but don't have an ethernet connection at the moment and this saves time stripping packages from the Sabayon 9 Xfce .iso and still leaves you with Fluxbox to work from.

@nemo, you're new to Linux and trying to use a tiling window manager? Steep learning curve unless you have experience with keybinds already.